Center for a New American Security

I am catching up this summer with some of those big books that have been silently taunting me from my bookshelf this year. The first book I tackled was George F. Kennan: An American Life. My short verdict on this book is that it quite justifiably won the Pulitzer Prize this past year. It is magisterial. One can hardly imagine another biography of Kennan ever needing to be written. What follows is not my judgment of the book, then, but rather some thoughts I had while reading it that might be of interest to readers of this blog:

1. The career of George Kennan really underlines the importance of area studies. Kennan did not graduate from a public policy school master's program. (Indeed, he learned most of what he knew of "strategy" in the process of developing the first curriculum for the National War College.) Instead, Kennan spent several years learning the Russian language and studying Russian politics, history and literature. The U.S. government, for its part, was wise enough to give him those years. Kennan was never a generalist. He was the U.S. government's foremost specialist on the Soviet Union, and from that position, he crafted his strategy for countering communism. That having been said ...

2. ... Whenever Kennan wrote or spoke about areas of the globe that were not Eastern Europe or Russia, he was often out of his depth. People remember Kennan getting Vietnam right, but they forget him getting most everything else about Asia wrong. As much as #1 should encourage those of us with an area studies background, #2 should serve as a warning.

3. Kennan got a lot wrong, in fact. Holy cow did he ever get stuff wrong. (So have a little more sympathy for those of us not as smart as Kennan, eh?) What did he get more wrong, more often, than anything else? His own country. It figures that one of the fathers of realism never really understood domestic politics in his own country or how it shaped foreign policy. Kennan was also perpetually pessimistic about the United States and Americans, failing to see the strengths of our society that helped us to win the Cold War.

4. Those worrying about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy today, myself included, should take note that Kennan too worried about this. But he was smart enough to know as well that the task of the diplomat is a lot easier "when you have a quiet little armed force in the background." (p. 241)

5. Style matters. Gaddis really drives this point home. Kennan's successes as both diplomat and historian can partly be explained by his ability to write and speak clearly. The ability to effectively communicate in the English language is so very, very important, yet many would-be policy professionals I meet cannot speak or write effectively.

6. The way Kennan thought about his own life and sin as well as human nature reflects the more liberal Calvinist traditions in the United States. I would have loved to have read Gaddis wrestle more with Kennan's faith. One very positive review of the book argued that a professional biographer -- Gaddis is an historian -- would not have so glossed over Kennan's infidelities. I wish he had spent more time on them as well, not because I think they matter in terms of Kennan's career but because the way he dealt with them seems to reflect how he viewed his faith and his own sin.

7. On p. 409, Robert Oppenheimer gives George Kennan some very good advice that any think tank scholar should follow. (No, I'm not telling you. Buy the book.)

8. I see a lot of value in quantitative methods as applied to political science, international relations, and security studies, but in my heart and head, I'm with Kennan: "...politics could never resemble physics because people were unpredictable. The only useful preparation for diplomacy came from history, as well as 'from the more subtle and revealing expressions of man's nature' found in art and literature. Students should be reading 'their Bible and their Shakespeare, their Plutarch and their Gibbon, perhaps even their Latin and their Greek.'"*

Cue angry email from Mike Horowitz or Erin Simpson in 3... 2...

What am I now reading? This biography of Bismarck.

*None of that stuff will win you tenure.

A few months ago, I read the memoir of a lieutenant who served in Afghanistan in 2008, which I argue had to have been the most frustrating year to fight in Afghanistan because it was the last year before policy makers had started paying attention to the war again but also one by which the Taliban had been fully reconstituted. The memoir was as depressing as you might imagine, but it was also a great reminder, contra Rajiv, of the incredible people we have sent to war. We have sent our fair share of lemons, true, but also some amazing Americans as well. I got to break bread with Matt Zeller over lunch a few weeks after reading his book and was blown away by the guy, who is something of a national treasure. Hopefully you will be as impressed as I was and will buy his book.

1. Your book opens with you as a somewhat idealistic young officer eager to serve in Afghanistan. It ends with your intense frustrations at the way the war was being fought. Walk me through that transition.

I come from a long tradition of American military service. My great-grandfather nine generations ago served under General Washington in the Continental Army during the War for Independence. My great-great-great-great-grandfather's Civil War Union Army uniform currently hangs in my closet along with the uniforms my great-grandfather wore in Europe in World War I and my grandfather wore in the South Pacific in World War II. So when the 9/11 attacks occurred, I felt a strong sense of not just patriotic duty to serve, but also a familial obligation. I struggled with the question of "how can I look at my children in the future and not do what my ancestors did before me?"I couldn't justify my relatively privileged middle class existence, for I hadn't really earned any of it -- my ancestors had. So after a few weeks of struggling with whether to drop out of school or shirk my civic duty, I walked into a mall in New Hartford, NY to buy a Christmas present and promptly enlisted to the first person I saw in uniform -- a National Guard recruiter. Two years later I earned my officer's commission through ROTC and finished college. Upon graduation, I was awarded the David Boren National Security Fellowship, which allowed me to go to grad school in fall 2004. While at grad school I was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency. Thus, in the summer of 2007, when I learned my reserve unit would deploy, I had just begun my agency career.

I focused my life to national service because of 9/11 and had hoped to serve in Afghanistan. I wanted revenge. The attacks had both profoundly angered and frightened me. Moreover, I wanted to ensure that I did my part to provide my children with the freedoms my ancestors provided me. I was thrilled to be headed to Afghanistan, for I felt that it was there I could make the most difference. The Army had ordered our unit to undertake the training of the Afghan Army and Police -- which to me, was the most important thing we could be doing in Afghanistan, even more important than killing Taliban, for by leaving a security force behind that could adequately replace us, we could ensure that the Taliban and Al Qaeda would never rise to power in Afghanistan again.

So yeah, I'd say I was overwhelmingly naive when we entered training at Fort Riley, Kansas in January 2008. But my naivety began to morph into angered frustration as we progressed through our pre-deployment training. I'll never forget how nearly every classroom training session began...

A sergeant would stand in front of our group and with an authoritative voice say, "Good Day gentlemen! Today I'm here to tell you how the enemy uses IED's (or whatever weapon/tactic/etc...) in Iraq!" Then they'd turn around to make sure their powerpoint presentation had started. When they'd turn back to face us, caught off guard to find all of our hands would be up. The sergeant would find our Colonel's hand and ask for his question. We'd all lower our heads as the Colonel would say, "Sergeant, we're not headed to Iraq, we're headed to Afghanistan...." The sergeant would get a deer-in-the-headlights look, pause, breathe, regain his composure and say, "well sir, I've never been to Afghanistan, I've only been to Iraq, but I'm sure its all the same..." And we'd resign ourselves to another likely meaningless two hour lecture. By the end of training, we had turned rather jaded, but still anxious to take on the mission.

We entered Afghanistan not really sure of what to make of it -- almost none of us had been there before. We found it to be the 5th World -- calling it the 3rd World is an insult to the 3rd World, for few places on Earth share Afghanistan's level of poverty and destruction. But, few places also share its natural beauty. People instantly loved or hated it there -- I fell in love the 2nd morning as I watched the sun rise over the snow packed mountains that ring Kabul.

That afternoon, the commanding General of CSTC-A at the time, MG Robert Cone, spoke with all 300+ of us -- the newest class of Embedded Combat Advisers. He asked by a show of hands how many people in the room had served in Iraq -- half of the people in the room raised their hands. And then he said the most profound statement I probably heard all of the war, "Men, I want you to understand something right now. This is NOT Iraq. This is Afghanistan. In Iraq, we do everything we MUST to win. Here in Afghanistan, we're doing everything we can." He then went on to contrast the time of response for a QRF in Iraq (which at that time was 12 minutes) to Afghanistan (2-4 hours), the time of flight for a medivac in Iraq (20 minutes) to Afghanistan (1-2 hours)...He told us we'd be alone, work under extremely austere conditions, and that the Army would ask more of us than it would ever be able to give. The speaker who followed him showed video of our predecessors getting blown up by Taliban IEDs and that's when it started to hit home -- not everyone in this room would go home alive.

The next day I packed up my bags and headed to join a convoy on its way to my new post in Ghazni on a small FOB called Vulcan. While loading up my gear I met the guys we were replacing. I asked what their year had been like, was Ghazni dangerous, and had they seen combat. They got really silent and then one of them smiled the strangest smile I had ever seen -- I'd later come to know it as the "I cannot believe I'm going home alive smile" -- and said "yeah man, Ghazni is fucked up. Really fucked up. Don't worry, you'll all earn your CIBs and CABs, every single one of us did..."

Two weeks later I had my Alive Day as I joined 14 of my brothers in an hour long firefight against approximately 45 Taliban who tried to overrun our position as we guarded one of our MRAPs that had just been destroyed by an IED. I ran out of grenades during that fight. The last thing I remember is a mortar round landing about 10 feet in front of me, its blast sending me flying backwards. In that split second between consciouness and the dark, I remember thinking "they're walking the rounds in on us, the next one will almost certainly kill me." When I came too, someone yelled "Zeller, friendlies to your six, DON'T SHOOT!" I lifted my head and saw the most beautiful sight -- three of our unit's hummers flying up the hill behind me. SFC Robinson swung his door open and in his South Carolina drawl exclaimed "Hey sir! I hear you're in a pickle. But I brought ya some help, including my MK-19, where do you need us?" To which both I and CPT Dean pointed to the ridge line at the crest of the hill. SFC Robinson's hummer charged into battle, its MK-19 blazing and the ridge line turned into the napalm scene from Apocalypse Now. The battle ended with all of us, by some miracle, still alive.

Whatever naivety remained on the morning of April 28th 2008, died by 1615 that afternoon, its fate sealed by the RPG rounds that initiated the assault on our positions.

So why this day? Well it personifies MG Cone's speech. Our QRF took an hour -- and they weren't even supposed to be our QRF, they were technically the radio retrans unit sent out to relay our comms as we think the Taliban were jamming us. Our air support consisted of two Dutch F16's, whose pilots didn't speak English and flew off the minute the Taliban attacked us. The 101st that was the actual QRF? They arrived three hours after the fighting stopped. And why were we there in the first place? Because our patrol that day had got lost as our maps were from the 1980's (when the Soviet Union still existed as a nation and fought in Afghanistan) and we ended up going down the wrong road, driving right into a Taliban ambush site. Our initial standard operating procedure following an IED was to secure all casualties and simultaneously assess if we held a defensible position. If not, we were to move to a position that was defensible. We quickly realized our position on a road outside an unfamiliar village, lost in some part of Waghez District, Ghazni Province, was not that defensible and thus we should employ our SOP -- i.e. move to better ground and destroy whatever equipment we couldn't take with us, which in this case was the $1.3 million paperweight that had been our convoy's lead MRAP. We radioed our intentions to the 101st (the unit to which we were op-conned) to which their battalion commander personally responded, "if you don't bring back that blown up vehicle don't bother coming back at all. We don't leave monuments to our failure like the Russians." And thus, our die-in-place mission and my alive day.

From that day forward, I watched as the war slowly fell apart at the hands of our Army's middle management -- typified by that battalion commander. Case and point, GEN McChrystal's tenure in Afghanistan. To me, the most compelling part of the Rolling Stone article is the scene where a sergeant down range writes an email to McChrystal stating he believes GEN McChrystal doesn't get the war and has ordered policies that are killing men on the front lines. GEN McChrystal gets on the next flight to this sergeant's FOB and goes on patrol with the sergeant's unit. Afterwards, he holds an After Action Review with the sergeant and his men in the outpost's makeshift chowhall. During the AAR he notices a laminated list posted on the chowhall's wall that reads something like "Rules of Engagement As Ordered By COMISAF." Upon reading the list, McChrystal says aloud "these aren't my rules." And thus my point, somewhere between GEN McChrystal issuing orders and the point at which these front line soldiers received them, the Army's middle management bureaucracy altered them to be significantly risk adverse.

This risk adverse mentality drove our operations by the end of our tour -- hard as we tried to fight and ignore it, it came to dominate our every movement, or lack thereof. On 26 JUN 2008, a unit in our bridage embarked on a trip from Paktika to Kabul. They ended up taking a route that bisects Logar and Wardak province, a road known as the Tangi Valley Road. In 2008, allied efforts in Afghanistan had two divergent commands, ISAF and CSTC-A. These commands divided the country differently and often had their field units residing on different FOBs. ISAF had all the resources and most of the men, CSTC-A had all the embedded combat advisers training the Afghan Security Forces. ISAF had deemed the Tangi Valley Road a black route. For whatever reason, CSTC-A never put this information out, so when the convoy traveled down the road, they had no idea that they'd drive straight into a horrendous ambush that would leave two of their three hummers destroyed and three US soldiers and one interpreter dead. As a result of this attack, the next day, CSTC-A declared that all of its units (i.e. we mentors) could only travel in convoys with six or more vehilces -- and that we needed to get permission for every mission from an O6 (Colonel) 72 hours prior to each movement. That one, risk adverse call, nearly sidelined us for the remainder of the war. We lived on a base of approximately 40 US soldiers divided into 5 teams. Six vehicle convoys meant that two-three teams had to travel together on each mission. As a result, every time a team went out, two Afghan units went without our mentoring, simply due to this vehicle restriction.

Indeed, throughout my tour, I also saw this middle management come into country for the first time, declare all policies before them to be 100% failure, and attempt to implement some new regime -- simply for the point of implementing new policy. Remember, no-one ever got promoted by maintaining the status quo, regardless of its effectiveness. By the end of our tour, we had two boards in our makeshift TOC -- "You Can't Make This Shit Up" and "Oh My God, Something Actually Went Right." The former had over 100 check marks, the latter had two.

I didn't want to leave Afghanistan this frustrated, but I realized early on that fighting a war with 100% organizational turnover every 365 days accomplished two things -- we repeated the mistakes of our predecessors and we never had a firm consistent set of goals that continuously directed our strategy and actions.

2. The year you spent in Afghanistan was arguably the toughest year of the war for U.S. servicemen -- the year before the Bush and Obama Administrations devoted new resources to the war. Did you feel neglected by the country? Did you feel your efforts were overshadowed by the war in Iraq?

Yes, totally. Look no further than what MG Cone said to us on Day One. Everything we MUST vs. everything we can. We had three route clearance patrol units for all of RC-East during my deployment. By the end of our tour, 80% of our territory was off limits without an RCP leading your travel on a mission. We went from running multiple missions a day to sitting on our FOBs waiting for one of those three RCPs to be available and capable (i.e. not in maintenance or repairs). And if we couldn't drive, flying was hardly an option either. In 2008, we had one aviation brigade for all of RC-E.

I'll never forget sitting in Kuwait, waiting for a flight home to take leave, and having soldier after soldier coming out of Iraq walk up to me and ask we what it was like to fight in a war where there really was a war still going on. That floored me, because they had everything and we had nothing. My FOB didn't have SIPR or even internet -- each man paid $50 a month to a guy named Baktash who lived in Kabul and in return he made sure that the satellite dish we bough received satellite internet, with speeds that rivaled dial-up from the mid 1990's.

The first time I went to Bagram I walked into one of their chowhalls and just stared in disbelief. I hadn't seen an ice machine in 6 months -- I had forgotten what it was like to have choices for food, let alone desert.

3. You served as an analyst in the intelligence community after you served in combat. What is the difference between the perspectives on the war one gets from each job?

As an analyst in the IC I had every tool and resource imaginable at my disposal and I couldn't share almost any of them with the guys who'd benefit most -- the front line soldier. Our military fights at the Secret or SIPR level. The IC fights at the Top Secret level. Very few FOBs in Afghanistan have Top Secret level connectivity, let alone personnel cleared to use top secret information. Its a problem that persists to this day and one we must fix.

Additionally, as an analyst in the IC, I found that there is too much duplication of effort throughout the 16 organizations that make up the US Intelligence Community. As a congressional candidate, I actually called for the consolidation of the IC into one US Department of Intelligence, headed by a Secretary of Intelligence. The current duplication of effort results in a gross waste of scarce budget and personnel resources and serves up too much confusion to US policy makers -- who are left wondering who to believe when Organization A reports the exact opposite of Organization B.

4. If a young man approached you and said he wanted to serve in the U.S. Army, what would you tell him?

That true leadership and respect are earned, always do what's right regardless of difficulty or popularity, always listen to his sergeants, and to only sleep under his sheets in basic training the night before linen turn-in.

5. You ran for Congress after returning from combat. Assuming we need more veterans serving in the Congress, what are some pitfalls that prevent veterans from doing so?

Money. During my run for office I came to realize that too often Americans send the best funded candidate to office, rather than the best candidate. Too much of my election was dedicated to raising money in order to put television ads out in the fall. Unfortunately, many Americans learn about candidates for office via political ads that air on TV -- hence, the importance of fall TV ads. Unfortunately, it costs around $2.2 million to win a seat in the United States House of Representatives. I don't know many veterans with $2.2 million to kick around. Moreover, running for Congress is a full time job (between the meetings with constituents, town halls, debates, fundraising, media events, press interviews, and parades). Thus, anyone who seeks to take on the burden of running for federal office must either have an employer who is willing to keep them on the payroll while they're off running an election, or suffer unemployment.

Regardless, I think veterans make ideal legislators, mayors, governors, and Presidents. Veterans are natural leaders who put their team (i.e. their constituents) and the mission (serving their constituents) ahead of themselves. If we could only take money out of the equation, then I think veterans would trounce any opponent, as they'd be competing on an equal playing field.

6. The last question is always about food or drink. What food or drink did you miss the most while deployed?

Bourbon and a good burger.

Not hard to understand why. Buy Matt's book here.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's excellent if depressing new book Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan comes out today. You may have already read excerpts in the Washington Post. Rajiv wrote much of the book while on leave from the Post and locked away in a cubby hole at the Center for a New American Security, so we are hosting a book event for him tonight to which you are all invited. 

I read the book in two sittings on Friday and Sunday afternoons. Rajiv's first book depressed me because I was close enough to the shenanigans up the road in the Green Zone to be angered by them. This book depresses me because I was even closer to many of the shenanigans in question and know some of the protagonists. I was also forced, in reading this book, to go back and think through my own assumptions in 2009, many of which I got wrong. Rajiv's third book, presumably, will be about how I myself incompetently managed the occupation of Syria and hosted wild parties at the embassy in Damascus while Marines fought mightily in Homs.

A friend of mine has never forgiven me for saying he was a "loser" in Tom's narrative of the Surge in Iraq. (He insists I called him a loser in life, which I didn't do -- I just wrote that he was a "loser" in the narrative Tom presented.) This book has very few winners and very many losers. The winners? A few intrepid U.S. military officers and diplomats. The losers? Pretty much everyone else -- and especially the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Agency for International Development. I really hope those two organizations in particular take the lessons from this book and remember them going forward but suspect they will instead go into a defensive crouch.

Anyway ... on to the questions. 

1. You argue, in this book, that the United States essentially lost the first year of the Surge in Afghanistan because of the way in which it allocated its troops — sending thousands of Marines to Helmand Province instead of, say, Kandahar City. Who was responsible for that decision?

The responsibility rests with several senior U.S. and NATO officers. When commanders at the NATO regional headquarters in southern Afghanistan were asked by their superiors in 2008 to identify how they would use an additional combat brigade, they picked Helmand over Kandahar. Those officers — Dutch Maj. Gen. Mart de Kruif and his deputies, among them U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson — identified four reasons to send the forces to Helmand instead of Kandahar.

First, that the Canadian forces who had responsibility for Kandahar province didn’t want to cede more territory to the United States. Some Canadian officials were convinced security in Kandahar was improving; others didn’t want to risk the embarrassment. Either way, U.S. commanders didn’t want to push the Canadians to shrink their battlespace.

Second, Helmand was the epicenter of poppy production.

Third, there were more Taliban attacks in Helmand than any other province.

And fourth, foreign troops needed to stay out of Kandahar city, given its cultural and religious significance.

Our own Abu Muqawama (then a member of General McChrystal’s initial assessment team) was among those to question all four points. As I write in the book, “If the mission were to protect the people, Exum thought, the new troops should be closer to the largest population center in the south, not where violence was worst. The drug argument similarly made no sense to him, since Richard Holbrooke had just announced that to avoid antagonizing farmers the United States would no longer participate in the eradication of poppy fields; a CIA study also claimed that the Taliban got most of its money from illegal taxation and contributions from Pakistan and Persian Gulf nations, not from drugs. And even if the Afghans were right about the psychological impact of foreign forces inside the city—some on the assessment team questioned that logic—the surrounding districts seemed like the best home for the Marines. The Taliban’s surge in Helmand was ‘a feint,’ Exum wrote in his notebook. ‘It draws our attention and resources away from Kandahar.’”

The ultimate decision on where to place the first wave of new troops authorized by President Obama in February 2009 rested with the top U.S. and NATO commander in Kabul at the time, Gen. David McKiernan.

When McChrystal arrived in Afghanistan in June 2009, he gave thought to moving the Marines. By then, however, it was too late. But even if it hadn’t been, his hands would have been tied, because of a conditions set forth by the Marine Commandant at the time, General James Conway. He insisted that the Marines operate in a contiguous area where they could be supported by their own aviation. That effectively ruled out Kandahar. Conway also insisted that a three-star Marine general at CENTCOM have overall operational control of the Marine brigade. That meant McChrystal couldn’t have moved the Marines to Kandahar without the approval of the Marine high command.

2. And people wonder why I love U.S. Marines but have very little patience for the U.S. Marine Corps. (I really need to burn those notebooks, by the way.) But is it really possible to hold the Obama Administration even partially responsible for a decision related to the order of battle on the ground? Sam Huntington argued that politicians should set the policy and agree on a set of strategic objectives and resources with their commanders but that it was up to the commanders themselves to figure out how to operationalize the strategy. Is it then reasonable to criticize the administration for errors made by field commanders?

I agree that it doesn’t make sense for the White House to manage operational or tactical decisions, but the president and his national security team should be fully aware of how the troops are being used. It’s just a brigade, you might say, so what’s the big deal? Perhaps in the context of World War II or Vietnam, it’s a rounding error, but in the context of Afghanistan, the rationale for the placement of 10,672 Marines out of an initial deployment of 17,000 troops should have been clearer to the White House. A new president, signing off on his first troop deployment, should at least have known — or been told — that a majority of those forces were being sent to a part of Afghanistan that is home to about one percent of the country’s population.

3. You displayed a lot of admiration for the U.S. Marine Corps in your reporting for the Washington Post and again in this book. But you also have some very sharp criticisms toward the way the U.S. Marine Corps protected its own parochial interests at the expense of what you see as the greater mission in Afghanistan. Describe for us why you admire the Marines who fought in Afghanistan but fault the Marine Corps as an institution.

I think the Marines — particularly the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade (the first tranche, which was sent in 2009) under the command of then Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson — did an amazing job under very challenging circumstances. The work they did in Nawa and Garmser, in particular, was standout COIN (putting aside questions of whether we should have been engaged in a full-on COIN mission there). Did Nicholson push into some places that USG and NATO civilian advisers -- and his NATO bosses in Kandahar and Kabul -- thought were unnecessary? Yes. But the fault, as I write, did not rest with him. He was given the troops, and he was doing what any good field commander would. He wasn't going to let them cool their heels at Camp Leatherneck.

The problem was tribalism — among the Americans, not the Afghans. Marine leaders did not really want to be joint and interoperable. They wanted their own turf, even to the detriment of the overall war effort.

This is what I write in the book:

"[Political adviser Kael] Weston didn’t think Nicholson was being insubordinate in moving into Taghaz. Taking Kamchatka was a rational act if you had the troops. Weston believed the surge had put too many pieces on the Risk board. The problem had been compounded by the decision to send the Marine brigade to Helmand instead of Kandahar. The blame for those choices lay not with Nicholson but in Washington. To Weston, Nicholson was an aggressive commander who was using the resources at his disposal to secure his entire area of operations. Weston disagreed with some of Nicholson’s moves, but the political adviser understood that the general was playing the generous hand he had been dealt. He wasn’t going to keep his Marines sitting on bases.

"There was no doubt in Weston’s mind — or in mine — that Nicholson had used his forces to transform the central Helmand River Valley, evicting the Taliban from its sanctuaries and giving the Afghans another chance to make something of Little America. By the time they departed in mid-2010, Nawa had grown so quiet that Marines regularly walked around without their flak vests. Much of Garmser was safe enough for American civilians to commence reconstruction projects. Hundreds of families were returning to Now Zad. Even the bleeding ulcer of Marja was starting to heal. Nicholson’s year in Helmand felt like the most dynamic and entrepreneurial period of the Afghan War. After years of drift, momentum was finally starting to swing America’s way."

And this from the last chapter:

“Over drinks with a Marine general in a still gentrifying Washington neighborhood, I compared Afghanistan to a run-down urban street. It seemed, I said, as if the United States were devoting a large share of its community redevelopment funds to transform one tenement at the end of the block into a swanky mansion. What happens, I asked the general, if we win Helmand but lose Afghanistan? ‘That would be just fine for the Corps,”’ he said.”

The 2nd MEB has been awarded the prestigious Presidential Unit Citation. I'm no judge of awards, but their work sounds PUC worthy to me. But what if they had done all of that good work closer to the country's second-largest population center?

4. You're also unforgiving in your description of the civilian effort in Afghanistan (in a chapter bluntly titled "Deadwood"). You've now been witness to incompetent U.S. civilian efforts in two wars. Is there any hope for the U.S. government in this regard? What does observing the U.S. civilian efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan make you think as a taxpayer?

I believe that our nation has the talent to engage in war-zone nation building, if that’s something we decide to do again. (Any policymaker or military leader who thinks that’s a good idea needs to have his or her head examined.) The problem is that those doing the hiring for the civilian component don’t look in the right places. Instead of scouring the United States for top talent to fill the crucial, well-paying jobs that were a key element of President Obama’s national security agenda — they should have brought in top-level headhunters. Those responsible for hiring (often bureaucrats in D.C. with no great sense of urgency or creativity) first turned to State Department and USAID officers in other parts of the world. But the best of them had already served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of those who signed up were too new to have done a tour in a war zone or too lackluster to have better career options. Then they turned to retirees and to contractors who had served in Iraq. The right people do exist. We just have to find them, and then convince them to serve their nation.

5. Despite the criticisms, there are some real heroes in this book. Kael Weston and Carter Malkasian stand out in particular. What makes guys like that special, and who are some other heroes?

Kael spent seven years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Carter spent two years in a hot and dusty forward operating base in Garmser. They built trust with the Marines they served with, and the Afghans. I really respect Kael and Carter, and I wish I could say they are two-of-a-kind, but the truth is that many civilians working for the government could be just like them. If they agreed to spend real time on the ground. If they took the time to build relationships, and, in Carter’s case, learn the language. If they were willing to flout stupid rules set down by the embassy’s security officer.

Most importantly, they were willing to define their jobs in ways to give them maximum influence. Kael called himself a political commissar, not a political adviser. He constantly reminded the Marines that they had been deployed in support of the Afghan people — and as an extension of civilian diplomatic policy, not the other way around. Carter also saw his role as more a proconsul than an adviser. He single-handedly cajoled influential tribal leaders and mullahs to return to Garmser district, correctly betting that their presence would lead others to follow. He won the trust of skeptical residents through countless meetings and roadside conversations, convincing them to reject the insurgency and support their government. He also shaped the Marine campaign in Garmser in a way no civilian had in other parts of the country. He served as a counselor to five successive battalion commanders, influencing decisions about when to use force and helping them calibrate it with a political engagement strategy. He built such credibility with the Marines that if he urged a different course of action than the one they were planning, they almost always complied. Larry Nicholson was among his biggest fans. He thought the Americans needed a Carter Malkasian in every district of Afghanistan.

They weren’t the only ones. State Department officer Marlin Hardinger spent three years working at the provincial reconstruction team office in Helmand. He’s just finished a year of Pashto study and will be heading back for another year or two. That’s dedication. There are/were others like them. But the problem is they are the exception, not the rule.

6. I always end with a question about food or drink. What are the top three most memorable meals you have enjoyed in Iraq or Afghanistan -- and why?

a. Eating chicken enrobed in an inch-deep layer of oil on the roof of the police station in Garmser with district governor Abdul Manaf. We spent a while joking about his deputy’s virility — the man had two wives and more than twenty children. But then the conversation moved onto the future of Afghanistan. It was then I wondered whether men like him — in whom the U.S. military and diplomatic corps had invested so much — would be able to survive once the Americans leave.

b. The First Strike MRE I cracked open after spending nine hours walking, kneeling, crawling and worming on my belly on the first day of the Marine operation to clear the Taliban from Marja. I was cold, wet, tired and miserable. Food never tasted better, even if it was processed junk with a ten-year-long shelf life.

c. The lunch that never was. I was on my way to have lunch with Ahmed Wali Karzai when I received word that he had been killed.

Ha. I sometimes test intelligence officers by asking them about local power brokers and who they had lunch with yesterday. It turns out a safe answer is "Rajiv Chandrasekaran." Buy his book here.

Last week, the president of the University of Virginia was fired. Although the reasons for Teresa Sullivan's dismissal are still unclear, there is evidence to suggest that the Board of Visitors believed she should be behaving less like an academic professional and more like a chief executive officer of a major corporation. Sullivan lacked, one board member complained, the "strategic dynamism" necessary for a person in her position. 

I have spent all but a few months of my adult life in either the U.S. military or in institutions for higher learning. I was commissioned as an officer in the infantry two days before graduating from college, and I started graduate school three months after leaving active duty. I then began teaching about six months after earning my Ph.D. In my work for the Center for a New American Security, meanwhile, I spend a lot of time with corporations. I am sometimes asked to meet with corporations with interests in the Middle East, for example, to help them think through the business environment and to talk about trends in the region.*

So I think I know something about universities and the military and a little bit about the way in which corporations function. Which qualifies me to say this: Not-for-profit universities are not corporations, and neither is the U.S. military. Neither organization should be treated like a corporation.

Smarter people than me have patiently explained why it makes little to no sense to treat an established, esteemed university like the University of Virginia as one would treat a corporation. As one Virginia professor put it:

I agree with all of this but want to extend this professor's worry to another institution I hold dear: the U.S. military. Over the weekend, I began to wonder why so many professional military reading lists contain business books that you would be less surprised to find on sale in an airport bookstore's "Management Excellence" section. Some of these books -- no disrespect to the authors -- can be summarized in a five-slide PowerPoint presentation. They probably were once a five-slide PowerPoint presentation but now push other, worthier books -- like Paret's Makers of Modern Strategy -- off the list of books we're telling military officers to read. The result is an officer class raised to believe their role in life is to manage organizations rather than, as the late Sam Huntington would have said it, to manage violence. I guarantee you we have officers running around Fort Benning, for example, who cannot tell you anything about Huntington's model for soldier-state relations and do not know the difference between the Moltkes elder and younger but can sure as hell explain the difference between spiders and bleeping starfish.

One can argue that businesses have a lot to teach universities because the former are more accountable to the cruel realities of the bottom line. Fair enough. But the price of victory and the costs of failure are more keenly felt in military organizations than they are in businesses, which is why some business writers study military organizations rather than visa versa. And which is why it makes good business sense for businesses to recruit military professionals.

But the military is not a for-profit corporation. It is a public organization that is specially recruited, trained and equipped to achieve the political objectives of elected policy makers through force. Can it learn something from studying the performance of businesses? Absolutely. I wish, for example, the U.S. Army officer corps had half the appetite for risk as entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But at the end of the day, the U.S. military, as results oriented as it should be and is, is not about turning a profit or rewarding shareholders, and its leaders should rein in their love affair with business models and the mostly execrable "literature" we force on our students in business schools.

Besides, this craze to make our universities and military organizations mirror our businesses is ironic. While the American model of capitalism is generally strong and often admired, it is by no means seen by the world as the undisputed model for how other businesses and business environments should look. Other successful capitalist economies often look at U.S. business culture and find much to criticize. U.S. institutions of higher education, though, are the undisputed model for others to follow and are universally admired outside the United States. The same can be said for the U.S. military, which for at least two decades has been the world's strongest and most admired military organization. Even before the financial collapse, meanwhile, during which your average second lieutenant could have taught most U.S. banks something about risk management, most businesses in the United States failed. 

That's a luxury military organizations are rarely allowed.

P.S. One final bit of irony? The decision made by Virginia's business-minded Board of Visitors is seriously hurting the university's bottom line. The decision to remove Teresa Sullivan may in fact end up a Harvard Business School case study. But not in a good way.

*Any compensation I am eligible to receive for this work I either decline or turn over to the Center for a New American Security in order to preserve the intellectual integrity of my work. The list of corporate or institutional sponsors for the Center for a New American Security, meanwhile, can be found here. Unlike all but a few think tanks, we make no effort to hide our sponsors. I join my colleagues in thanking them for their support. 

If you are in Washington, DC today and have already given up on your New Years resolution to go to the gym after work each day, swing by the W Hotel around 6:00 tonight for an event featuring Philip Taubman's new book, The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. Taubman's book received a very positive review in the New York Times on Sunday. 

I am no specialist in nuclear weapons or arms control, but can I still share Henry Kissenger's doubts about whether "Nuclear Zero" is actually a good idea in practice?

Kissinger’s doubts hang ominously over “The Partnership.” The technology cannot be uninvented; when one country goes to zero, its enemy is sorely tempted to cheat; and the scarier the government, the less amenable it is to disarming. Many of the governments and dignitaries calling for abolition are just mouthing the words.

My worries exactly. Anyway, please RSVP here if you plan on attending. I am sure CNAS director Bill Perry will have lots of smart responses to my above concerns. 

One of the biggest compliments I have received as a researcher came in the summer of 2010, when Nick Blanford, who was finishing a military history of Hezbollah, asked me to read and comment on his thousand-page manuscript. Even though Nick and I had been friends for several years, it takes a lot of trust to give someone working on a very similar subject to your own full access to your unedited work and all your sources. (I was finishing up a doctoral dissertation on Hezbollah at the time.) Now that the manuscript has been pared down to just 544 pages and published, I can tell you that if you only buy and read one book this holiday season, it should be Nick's Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah's Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel. Nick was in town last week, and I convinced him to participate in a question-and-answer session for the blog. I respect Nick so much that I even changed the way I transliterate Hizballah Hezbollah in his honor -- something I have only done once before, for Thomas Hegghammer. 

Nick, first off, thank you so much for allowing me to read this book when it was still in its unedited early drafts. It was incredibly useful to me as I finished my dissertation, and it was a rip-roaring yarn. What a fantastic story you have written. This is truly the work of a lifetime, and I have been telling people for 12 months now, when they ask me about the one book they should read on Hezbollah, that they should read your magnum opus. Tell us: how relieved are you to have this work finally published?

Thanks, Ex, for those kind words. I guess I have mixed feelings about finishing the book. It's a project that was over a decade in the making. I first began mulling a book on Hezbollah's military evolution around 1999 as the Israeli occupation was drawing to an end and the prospects of peace between Israel and Syria were looking good. If peace had been achieved, it would have led to Hezbollah's disarming. Of course, there was no peace deal and Hezbollah has only grown stronger since then. One writes to one's strengths and my intention always was to write a book telling Hezbollah's military story which has been the focus of most of my reporting from Lebanon over the past decade and a half. There are plenty of good books on Hizbullah looking at its ideology and structure, but nothing comprehensive on the "resistance" which after all is the most important component of the party. I have been lucky enough to be in a unique position for a foreign journalist to watch in microscopic detail Hizbullah's military evolution unfold in real time since the mid 1990s. I wanted to produce a book of record that had sufficient weight to interest scholars and academics in the field who hopefully will continue to find it useful 10 or 20 years down the road, but also to provide enough color, reportage and anecdote to make it accessible to a more lay audience. When I began the writing process, I assumed I would need Hezbollah's help to fill gaps in my research, but as it turned out, my problem was not finding more information but choosing what to exclude from a rapidly expanding manuscript. You, Ex, had the misfortune of being the only person who read the much longer original manuscript, which was nudging a quarter of a million words before I started cutting. Very often, a book is improved when it is trimmed down and the MS becomes tighter. I think that's the case with Warriors, but there were some elements and stories that I was sorry to leave on the cutting room floor. In particular, the family and friends of Mohammed Saad, this incredibly resourceful and interesting Amal leader in south Lebanon in the early 1980s, provided me with boxes of information, but I could only use a fraction of it in the book.

Hezbollah goes from just another crappy Lebanese militia in the early 1980s to the most feared non-state actor in the world. Briefly tell us how.

Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s and was initially very much guided by the Iranians. It owes its creation to the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, although its leadership had been mulling establishing some form of anti-Israel resistance that followed the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini since the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. Hezbollah's military exploits began slowly but by the latter half of the 1990s they had come to dominate the resistance against the Israeli occupation in the south. In those days, it was fairly ramshackle, and tactics - such as human wave assaults against Israel outposts - cost them a lot of casualties. Hezbollah's "Golden Years" were in the 1990s - the second phase of the party's evolution - when with the civil war over and under the protection of Syria, Hezbollah was able to focus its activities on resistance. The Islamic Resistance was adaptive and a quick learner and it was fascinating in those days to watch them improve year-on-year. The Israeli withdrawal in 2000 marked the beginning of Hezbollah's third phase. This is where they evolved from a resourceful guerrilla group employing classic hit-and-run tactics into something that folks like you describe as a "hybrid force" - a group that employs a blend of guerrilla and conventional weapons and tactics. Hezbollah today is probably the most formidable non-state military actor in the world. Although we concentrate on Hezbollah's ever expanding arsenal of weapons, for me the most telling aspect of its evolution is its highly complex and advanced electronic warfare and communications systems.

This book focuses primarily on Hezbollah's military activities, but as you know, I always argue the non-kinetic lines of operations -- the information operations, the social services -- are as important to Hezbollah as their military operations. Do you agree?

Absolutely. Hezbollah understood the importance of hearts-and-minds very early on. In fact, it was the Iranians that introduced the concept back in 1982 when among the first things they did on arriving in the Bekaa in the summer of that year was to begin building clinics and providing basic social services along with the lectures and religious educational programs. Jihad al-Binna, Hezbollah's flagship social welfare organization, began operating in 1985. I write about this in the book and how Hezbollah has expanded the social welfare activities to create what they call a "culture of resistance". This makes it much more than simply patching up war-damaged homes, providing free education and medical aid. The community becomes part of the "resistance". Youngsters now grow up in an atmosphere of resistance, jihad, martyrdom and hostility toward Israel. Hezbollah does not accept combatants below the age of 18, but by the time a new recruit has reached the age to join the Islamic Resistance, the chances are he will have been immersed since childhood in Hezbollah's "culture of resistance", reading anti-Israeli cartoon books when he was a kid, attending religious classes and Islamic scouting camps in the school holidays. Maybe even getting some basic weapons training when a young teenager. This culture, or society, of resistance testifies to Hezbollah's long-term strategic vision. Obviously the social welfare programs, the creation of a culture of resistance and even the parliamentary presence from 1992 was intended to build up and sustain Hezbollah's base of support. However, the byproduct of this massive emotional and financial investment is that Hezbollah today has a large constituency towards which it is answerable. When you win over a sizeable percentage of the population to your side, you have to respect and satisfy their needs. That adds another layer of complexity to an organization that is ideologically tied to a country 650 miles to the east the interests of which may not always coincide with the interests of Hezbollah's Lebanese constituency.

How does a researcher like yourself even write such a book? How did you gain the incredible access you gained, and are you worried about how the book will be received among your sources?

I have access to a number of Hezbollah people who are willing to talk to me either because they have come to know me over the years or on the assurances of mutual acquaintances. These guys are not supposed to talk to me at all, of course, so I am very careful to protect their identity. Mind you, what they tell me is a fraction of what they know, but it's more than other people get. I didn't ask for Hezbollah's formal help for my research. I have a huge database of information which I have built up over the past 16 years and I have interviewed just about all Hezbollah's leadership at some time or other. Will Hezbollah like the book? I think they will like some things and won't like others. It's a controversial subject and I think there's something in there for everyone to love and hate.

This is a two part question: a) why, in your professional reason, did I kill Rafik Hariri, and b) is it true that when Hezbollah speaks of the most gifted military commander they have ever faced, they speak of me on the paintball court?

I have always felt that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has been wasting its time examining the alleged roles of Syria and Hezbollah in Hariri's assassination. When I was researching my previous book - Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and its Impact on the Middle East - I quickly discovered the intense rivalry and hostility between you and Hariri: the financial dealings that went sour, how he thwarted your political ambitions in Lebanon, how you stole his girlfriends. You may recall that I was planning to expose the entire plot before your lawyers threated legal action. The truth will out one day, my friend. Seriously though, the guy who spread this rumor was acting extremely irresponsibly and really should be held accountable for spreading such malicious and potentially dangerous falsehoods. As for the paintball competition, all I recall of that was you curled up on the floor pleading for mercy as the Hezbollah guys splattered you with paint pellets. Or was that me?

It was probably me. A certain H.P. Flashman has always been my role model when the bullets -- or paintball pellets -- start flying. Anyway, I always end these interviews with a few questions about food and drink. You, my friend, are a past master of the Beirut bar scene, but now that you are a family man with a beautiful wife and kids, where do you like to go in Lebanon for a nice meal?

I like the Greedy Goose because they serve locally brewed 961 beer and I meet some journo friends there once a week. I am out of touch with most bars in Beirut these days. I preferred the good old days when there were perhaps three bars in Beirut, the best of which was the Lord Kitchener which was at the back of an abandoned shopping center in Hamra and had a very laid-back speakeasy-type atmosphere and a wicked oud player. As for food, still love Le Chef, an institution. Best cafe is Cafe Younes in Hamra. I used to live above the cafe in 1995-96 when it was just a place to buy freshly ground coffee and knock back a double espresso in the morning. Otherwise, it's local cafes and restaurants dotted around the country. Eat foul in the Tyre souq. There's a brilliant sandwich place in Dar al-Wassah in the Bekaa - best labneh sandwiches in Lebanon. I also stop at Abu Rashed next to the army barracks in Marjayoun. They make terrific shish taouq. Corny though it may sound, the best meal is the one with a couple of spit roast chickens, olives, bread and with the family on a picnic somewhere high up in the mountains.

That doesn't sound corny in the least. Thanks, Nick. As for the rest of you, you know what to do: buy Nick's book here.

On a recent plane ride home from Germany, I finished Steve Inskeep's Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, which I can recommend to all of you with confidence. I was, as I mention in my interview with Steve, happily surprised by this book. It's a really great introduction to both the mess that is Pakistan and the greatness that is the Pakistani people. It's also an interesting reflection on urban planning and the rise of mega-cities. Interviewing Steve bleeping Inskeep of all people can be an intimidating experience, but as with all of these things, I just posed some questions and let the man himself take it away.

I was happily surprised by this book. It's multidimensional: on the one hand, it tells the story of Karachi, but on the other hand, it also succeeds in telling that story within two broader contexts. First, it places Karachi within the context of Pakistan's history and politics. Second, it treats the development of Karachi as one example of what you see as a global trend: the rise of "instant cities." (I'm married to a woman who works on development in South Asia, so this is that rare book that we can read together.) Explain to the blog, though: what is an instant city?

Thanks for your generous comments. An instant city is a metropolis that’s grown so swiftly that a person who knew it at the end of World War II would scarcely recognize it today. I keep this definition impressionistic, because I’m not sure I fully trust all the statistics I’ve seen. But to be a little more precise, I define an instant city as one whose population has grown since the war at a substantially higher rate than the country to which it belongs. Those cities tend to be destinations of the greatest mass migration in human history, the worldwide move to cities in recent decades. As different kinds of people concentrate on a city, they mix together, trade ideas, or clash.

In an instant city, the new overshadows the old—as in Karachi, which has at least 30 residents today for every resident at war’s end. In historic terms, the city has appeared in an instant. It can change in an instant. Or turn deadly in an instant. In these respects, Karachi is normal in the developing world, as you both know from experience.

For American policymakers, our swift evolution into a mostly urban species affects everything from economic plans to foreign aid strategies to the battlegrounds of future wars. Or current wars: see Baghdad, ten times larger than in 1950 and a nightmarishly complex killing field for several years. Yet for all the horrors of such swiftly changing places, they’re also expressions of hope. People moved there seeking better lives.

The story of Karachi, meanwhile, as told in the book, is in many ways the story of the state of Pakistan. For an American audience, what does Karachi tell us about Pakistan today?

Pakistanis call Karachi a microcosm of their country, and they’re right. People have migrated from all over the country, as well as every other part of South Asia, to form Pakistan’s most diverse city. And so you see microcosms of Pakistan’s great conflicts between different ethnic groups who speak different languages, between religious groups, between rich and poor, between the military and everybody else. The military’s economic power is spectacularly on display along the waterfront, where they own many square miles of land near the beach, and have been developing luxury apartment towers, a “six-star” club, and a golf course. At the same time, far-flung neighborhoods have hardly any electricity or other services, and the real estate market thrives on unauthorized development on government land. It’s an impossibly complicated and stressful place. Yet there is a certain endurance in the people that keeps things moving, as does an eye on the main chance—you can make money in a growing city. Karachi still functions as the economic heart of Pakistan, which is one reason I don’t agree with those who describe Pakistan as a failed state. When I think failed state, I think Afghanistan in late 2001: little armies wandering around, burned-out tanks along bomb-cratered roads, scarecrow men trying to hand-crank the last dregs of fuel out of a gas-station pump. Pakistan is not that bad yet, although in all fairness the electricity does go out daily, and citizens use words like “crazy” or “mafia” to describe their government, and I do think large swaths of Karachi have evolved beyond conventional government control.

Middle Easterners and South Asians often tell me they "love Americans but don't very much like the United States." I sometimes feel the same about Pakistan -- a nation that has, at the very least, sheltered so many enemies of the United States over the past decade and has frustrated our efforts in Afghanistan. But I have so many wonderful Pakistani friends, and there are so many great Pakistani heroes in your book. The Edhi family -- "passionate, witty, resilient, and gloriously strange" in your words -- stands out in particular. At the nadir in U.S.-Pakistani relations, who are some other Pakistani heroes Americans should know about?

Let me call your attention to Dr. Seemin Jamali, a woman who for years has run the emergency department of a major public hospital in Karachi. On February 5, 2010, her emergency department was flooded with victims of a bombing and their families. A Shia procession had been struck—an attack on a religious minority, which is normal in Pakistan. And then a second bomb exploded at the entrance to the emergency department. Many people were killed, the windows were blown out, and the medical equipment was looted in the panic that followed—yet Dr. Jamali and her colleagues had the emergency department running again the next day. (Note: this fairly incredible story of courage and duty is told at greater length in the book.)

She told me afterward that she believed in treating every person the same, regardless of color, caste, or creed. It was a statement echoing an old speech by the founder of Pakistan. For all the awful things that some people have done over the years in Pakistan, the country also has a different and more honorable tradition. Some people struggle to uphold that tradition, even though many have been beaten, intimidated, silenced, driven into exile, or killed. This book will be worth the time and effort if I manage nothing other than to introduce Americans to a few such people.

My wife and I, like many thousands of other Americans, wake up to your dulcet voice every morning. Which begs the question: how the hell did you find the time to research and write this book while fulfilling your duties at NPR?

Thanks for listening. The short answer is that I missed a little work, lost a lot of sleep, and will forever be grateful for the forbearance of my family and friends. The longer answer is that I first reported Karachi in 2002, and did a series of reports on the city in 2008, so I had some history with the place. Then I took a series of trips expressly for the book in 2010, burning vacation time I had accumulated. Between trips I was gathering archival information from the Library of Congress and several other archives. And of course Pakistan has been constantly in the news, so I was regularly covering and learning about the country for my day job.

You report mostly from Washington. Does this book -- and the reporting from Pakistan that inspired it -- make you want to report more from abroad? Do you, like some think tankers I could name, sometimes feel chained to your office in the 202 area code?

I try not to be. Just before taking host jobs at NPR, I reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and knew I needed that to continue. I would not have accepted the Morning Edition job had it not included the freedom to travel and see things for myself. NPR embraced that idea and didn’t want it any other way. So I’ve been over the years to Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, and many other places at home and abroad. Every trip abroad informs interviews I do later from the studio. It’s true that I never travel as much as I think I should, and that I have to keep my trips very focused and hurry back to the show. Sometimes it kills me – I was in Egypt last spring, for example, but never made it to Libya. But there is some compensation. I work a job where, in the course of a few months, I might talk with a general, a novelist, an economist, the President, the governor of my home state, a poor laborer in a Cairo cement factory, voters in Ohio, and a widow outside New Orleans. It’s this wonderfully broad education. If you feel that I ended up writing a “multidimensional” book, maybe it grows out of my multidimensional job. It encourages broad thinking, and seeing the connections between seemingly unrelated stories, and feeling the sweep of history.

And here I was, thinking I had a pretty sweet gig myself. I end each of these things with a question on food and drink. What are the top three restaurants in Karachi, and why?

I’m delighted that you asked. If you visit friends in Karachi you will almost certainly be taken to Barbecue Tonight whether you ask to go or not. Nor should you mind. If you arrive early for dinner—and by early, I mean Pakistan early, about 10:00—you can get a table on the rooftop, looking across the harbor toward the central business district. Everything on the menu is outstanding. The restaurant is several floors high, and as you walk downstairs to leave at midnight you will notice that every table is filled and there is a line of people at the door.

I recommend the surreal experience of eating at Shaikh Abdul Ghaffar’s Kabab House, which is on a pier at the harbor known as the Native Jetty, now rebranded as “Port Grand,” a heavily guarded row of upscale shops. The meat here is so finely ground as to be almost creamy, but the real reason to go is the craziness of the setting. In one direction you see the harbor cranes; in the other, a waterside Hindu temple.

You will find some middlebrow choices if you venture through the chaotic traffic on Burns Road, or out in the industrial zone called SITE Town, where a gigantic madrassa makes some extra money running a rather clean and formal restaurant. But if you have a basic faith in the safety of cooked food, then I suggest that you bypass these choices and pick out one of many simple restaurants that are open to the street, with no front wall. They may serve only two or three dishes, cooked in metal pots by the entrance. The restaurant you want is probably not spiffy: a certain level of dilapidation often signals comfort food, sort of like when you arrive at an older American diner. In the book I feature one such restaurant called the Delhi Darbar, near the old city hall. The menu does not include much beyond soft drinks and biryani, hunks of meat and other ingredients mixed into rice. I have always found it to be excellent, although it is so powerfully spiced that in all honesty, if it wasn’t any good, I would never know.

Thanks for the tips! Steve can be heard each morning on NPR's Morning Edition, and his book can be bought here. 

This week in Washington, a conference at the National Defense University has gathered some of the world's leading experts on terrorism. A few nights ago, I joined some of them for a few beers and to be amazed by their collective brilliance. One conspicuous absence from the gathering was my friend Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who was out hitting the pavement, selling his new book, Bin Laden's Legacy: Why We're Still Losing the War on Terror. I read the book while it was still a .doc and really enjoyed it, so I appreciate the time he took to answer a few questions for the blog.

I really wish your new book were not as persuasive at it is. It makes for depressing reading, in large part because it’s such effective argumentation. Walk us through your thesis and summarize your argument.

Thanks for the kind words, Ex; as a long-time reader of your blog, it’s an honor to join you for this discussion. My thesis is that the United States has done a poor job of understanding al-Qaeda during the past decade, and as a result America’s offensive and defensive measures in the fight against the jihadi group have often played into its hands. Al-Qaeda had, in my view, two overarching strategic objectives on September 11, 2001. One was to diminish the powerful U.S. economy. The other was to make the conflict with the United States as broad as possible, expanding it into multiple regions and thus fueling the perception that America was at war with Islam, not just a small group of Islamic militants.

The U.S. lack of strategic understanding of al-Qaeda at an official level is easy to document through a look at the most important documents the government has produced addressing this question. A key example is the “National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism” (NMSP-WOT), published by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As you know, understanding an enemy’s ends, ways, and means is fundamental for military planners—that is, what is the enemy’s goal, and what are the ways and means by which the enemy will pursue this goal. The NMSP-WOT contains no ends, ways, and means assessment for al-Qaeda, but tellingly, does perform this analysis for the United States. Similarly, neither the White House’s “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism” nor the 9/11 Commission Report perform an ends, ways, and means assessment of the jihadi group. The typical method of analyzing al-Qaeda in these documents is discussing its goal of re-establishing the caliphate, and then its use of the tactic of terrorism—leaving an unresolved disconnect between goal and tactic. It’s as though the unstated assumption is that the group doesn’t think strategically, a truly unjustified assumption.

As a result, the U.S. measures for combating al-Qaeda often played into its hands. The price tag of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been over $1 trillion in direct budgetary outlays—and the true cost has been even greater when such second-order consequences as deficits and rising oil prices due to resulting instability are considered. And it isn’t just our wars that have driven up the cost of fighting Islamic extremism: the United States has also created a bloated, expensive, and inefficient system of defending the homeland against attack. Not all of our economic woes are attributable to the fight against al-Qaeda by any means: jihadis didn’t cause the subprime mortgage bubble, no matter what ridiculous claims they offer. [I think the jihadis run those loan shops outside military bases, actually. -- A.M.] But our spending on military, intelligence, homeland security, and other counterterrorism matters hasn’t helped. While I have some reservations about Brown University’s recent study about costs associated with military aspects of the “war on terror,” its hefty price tag of between $3.2 and $4 trillion seems like a reasonable estimate based on my research.

My book traces the evolution of al-Qaeda’s strategy for economically undermining the United States through several phases, including terrorist attacks aimed at economic targets, embroiling America in bleeding wars in the Muslim world, and attacking vital oil targets. This strategy culminates in the group’s current phase, which some militants have called the “strategy of a thousand cuts.” This refers to a phase of smaller but more frequent attacks—some of them expressly designed to drive up our security costs—that was initiated after the September 2008 collapse of the U.S. financial sector made us seem mortal to our enemies.

One of the significant framing devices in Bin Laden’s Legacy is the famous 1974 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. This fight was referenced in an article by political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft published in the journal International Security a few months before 9/11, titled “How the Weak Win Wars.” Foreman, the strongest fighter of that generation, was heavily favored—but was defeated by Ali’s “rope-a-dope” strategy, which turned Foreman’s strength against him. “Ali appeared to cower against the ropes,” Arreguín-Toft recounted. “Foreman, now confident of victory, pounded him again and again.” Though it appeared to spectators that Foreman was winning, the elastic ring ropes were in fact absorbing much of the force of the punches. Foreman’s attacks only succeeded in tiring him, and Ali pulled off an upset by knocking out his exhausted opponent in the eighth round. That, Arreguín-Toft argued, is how small and relatively weak actors (like al-Qaeda) can defeat a superpower like the United States: by turning its strength into a weapon against it. I think Bin Laden’s Legacy makes it depressingly clear that al Qaeda has been able to execute a rope-a-dope of its own over the past decade. The United States has battered it furiously, and has exhausted itself in the process.

I remember, when you were writing this book, you coming over to my apartment to talk about the Iraq War. As I recall, I had to pour a few whiskies for us before we could talk about Iraq. You make the case that Americans of all political stripes need to understand the negative consequences of our decision to go to war in Iraq and the way in which we went about the conflict there. Tell us more. (But wait for one moment while I fetch the rye.)

I think understanding the mistakes involved in our decision to go to war in Iraq is important because it was a major strategic blunder (and let’s be frank: the enormous human costs of the war make it so much more than that). A lot of our shortcomings in fighting jihadi militancy over the past decade have been strategic, and a failure to appreciate the consequences of the Iraq war means we haven’t grasped an absolutely vital strategic lesson.

Now, it’s well known that the justifications for the Iraq war haven’t held up: Saddam Hussein’s regime didn’t have an active WMD program, nor did it have significant connections to al-Qaeda (though some connections did in fact exist). And we can see many of the costs of that conflict clearly. In addition to the aforementioned human costs, our invasion of Iraq damaged the war effort in Afghanistan (which quickly became an economy-of-force mission as resources were diverted to the Iraq theater), allowed the regeneration of al-Qaeda’s core leadership as pressure was removed from it, angered our allies while empowering the Iranian regime, and served as a potent tool for jihadi recruitment.

These costs, though not totally unforeseeable, have become clearer after the fact. But one point I make in the book is that a better appreciation of al-Qaeda’s strategy would have made the dangers of invading Iraq quite apparent in advance. As I said, al-Qaeda had two overarching strategic ideas about defeating America: bleeding its superpower adversary’s economy, and making the battlefield on which the fight against the United States occurred as broad as possible. The Iraq war plainly advanced both of our adversary’s goals. Despite the best-case scenarios concerning the war’s costs trumpeted by the Bush administration, it was extremely expensive—something that people like army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki foresaw. And the Iraq invasion helped the other major element of al Qaeda’s strategy, broadening the battlefield and feeding the group’s narrative that Islam itself was under attack by the United States.

If we have waged this war on terror so foolishly, what is a smarter way to combat terror? If you could recommend some changes in U.S. policy to the president, what would you recommend?

My chapter containing policy prescriptions runs about 30 pages. A couple of notes about that. First, I really dislike the tendency of books and studies produced inside the Beltway to contain a fairly good description of the problem set that we confront, complemented by vague and often worthless policy prescriptions. Because of my reservations about that formula, I would have simply published a book without any policy recommendations if I felt that I couldn’t come up with something that legitimately added to our thinking. But second, from a policy perspective, I think the implementation of a concept tends to be more important than the basic concept itself. I find that when I distill my rather long thoughts on policy (the implementation) down to talking points (the concepts), some value is lost in translation.

That caveat (apology?) aside, my prescriptions fall into three basic categories: strategy, efficiency, and resiliency. I’ve already spoken about America's rather weak strategic understanding of al-Qaeda over the past decade. We can’t undo past mistakes, but we can prevent a repetition of the same errors if key officials are able to understand both the evolution of al-Qaeda’s strategy and where it stands as of 2011. Further, we need a strategy that is better suited to the age of austerity that we’re entering. Our military intervention in Libya, where the United States had essentially no strategic interests, is in my view the opposite of the kind of grand strategy we need in a world of constrained resources.

In terms of efficiency, we should be looking for ways to do more with less. One way is analytic reform in the intelligence community: creating professional incentives for analysts to specialize, and reducing unnecessarily duplicative efforts. As one analyst said to me while I was researching for the book: “How many of these 800,000 people within the intelligence community are actively advancing U.S. interests? If they aren’t doing so, there’s a legitimate question to be asked: Why are you here?” A second efficiency measure is civil service reform. One core reason for our overreliance on costly contractors for national security needs has been how difficult it is to hire and fire federal employees. Civil service reform has been politically impossible in the past, but it would so obviously be good for the country that I think it should be revisited.

As for resiliency, another terrorist attack may succeed despite our best efforts. We should be building up our societal resilience—not just infrastructural but also psychological. There are smart ways to empower individuals and at the same time make communities safer in the face of terrorism or natural disaster. The Community Emergency Response Team model employed in California and Phoenix, Arizona is promising.

I really enjoyed your first book, My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir. I think I read it in just a few evenings and found your personal story to be fascinating. You remain, in fact, the only Christian ex-Muslim Jew I know. If you don’t mind me asking a personal question, tell me how your spiritual journey continues to inform your scholarship and the questions you ask in your work.

I’m glad you enjoyed it. For readers who aren’t familiar with this rather unusual journey, and don’t feel like reading an entire book about it, I recently did a Bloggingheads segment with Matt Duss where I explain the whole thing fairly cogently. So there are a couple of ways this early-life experience informs my scholarship. One is that I take religion more seriously than a lot of scholars do. To be frank, I think that most (though by no means all) work in the field that touches upon religious or theological issues is embarrassingly bad, including numerous unproven assumptions and analytical errors that would likely be called out were the scholars discussing something other than religion. I also think there’s a bit of projection at play for largely secular academics: they often see religion as a thin pretext for violent non-state actors precisely because they themselves don’t find religion to be a strong motivating force. But just as you can’t simply assume that groups like al-Qaeda don’t think strategically, you also cannot simply ignore their proclamations that hold religion to be a strong motivating factor. This is not to say that their claims should be taken at face value: but at the very least, we owe it to ourselves as scholars to consider the possibility that they might be true.

The second way it informs my work might seem counterintuitive, but I find that I’m not forced to re-think my basic assumptions about issues I encounter in the field all that frequently. The reason for this relates to something that this spiritual journey instilled in the way I intellectually approach new problem sets. Now, this statement is counter-intuitive for an obvious reason: I changed religions a couple of times, a fact that on its face might make me seem flighty or prone to sudden shifts. But the spiritual progression that you outlined was a product of seeing something through a couple of different frames. Jesus had always been a compelling religious figure for me: my parents, though they didn’t believe in his divinity, had artwork of Jesus around the house when I was growing up, and I had a decent familiarity with the New Testament. One of the reasons I became Muslim was because my level of comfort with that faith’s explanation of Jesus was greater than my level of comfort with Christianity’s explanation. At that point, I saw religion through a specific, rather Western lens: I thought the purpose of religion was forging a relationship with God with which I felt comfortable. After I graduated from college, I worked for a Wahhabi charity, and the frame through which I viewed religion shifted: I came to see its purpose not as forging a relationship with God that made me comfortable, but as understanding and obeying God’s will. I came to accept some rather extreme conclusions about what my faith mandated within this paradigm. Obviously, I moved away from that, and have been a practicing Christian for more than a decade.

But one result of that rather circuitous religious journey is that I find, at this point in my life, that I intuitively examine a new problem set I encounter through multiple frames at the very outset. Similar to how I ended up seeing religion through several different paradigmatic lenses over the course of a few years, I now, when approaching a new problem, try to understand it through several different paradigmatic lenses before drawing any conclusions. This is not to say that I’m more thoughtful than other people in my field; just that I have a different approach than I would have without the experiences that you touch upon, and I think I am therefore more thoughtful than I would have been otherwise.

While we’re on personal subjects, it’s no secret that the blogosphere and Twitter encourage the worst snark, sarcasm and ugliness from people. You and I have talked about our mutual struggles to remain civil and polite while engaging with others, but unlike me, your reputation is unimpeachable: you always respond to your critics and other readers with politeness and courtesy. Why does civility matter in our line of work? And how do you discipline your own speech in the public sphere? Is there a trade-off? Do we lose something in terms of honesty by being polite?

I’ve come to see civility as important for a variety of reasons, but honestly, practical reasons loom rather large. First of all, it’s generally hard to win a name-calling contest. If I call someone an America-hating pinko, they can fire back that I’m a right-wing tool of the military industrial complex. Those two insults seem essentially to cancel each other out: why give someone an area that can end up a draw if I believe that I can prove all of my other arguments to be correct? Second, I find that if I’m civil, I can actually (sometimes) persuade people I’m arguing against that they’re wrong about an issue. In contrast, if I begin a debate by insulting someone, it only further entrenches him in his initial position, thus making it more difficult to talk sense into him.

I’ve found the balance I strike in my own small corner of the public sphere to be rather intuitive and comfortable. I’m unyielding when making arguments, but generally try not to belittle the people I’m engaging. If they really are so dumb that I feel like I can’t help but insult them, it’s almost always easier to disengage than to tell them how I really feel.

I don’t think there’s a trade-off involved in being polite. Being polite isn’t the same as being a pushover, nor is it the same as false collegiality that needlessly avoids confrontation. Indeed, I think that kind of fake collegiality should be avoided: the review I published this year of Robert Pape and James Feldman’s Cutting the Fuse is probably one of the harshest critiques a graduate student has produced of a work of that stature. But again, it eviscerates their argument without really personalizing the matter.

Finally, I think it’s much more important to be polite or collegial to people who are just breaking into the public sphere and are feeling their way around than to those who are well established. For those who are young and realize they have a lot to learn, it’s possible to help them in that process. People who are better established are usually more hardened in their views. For those who have become tenured professors or have been part of the National Security Staff, if I don’t like what they stand for now, then I probably never will.

You may be a tree-hugging Oregonian, but your charming wife is a Daughter of the South and knows her whisky. What has she taught you over a decade of marriage? When you’re writing and need a glass of something stronger than coffee, what do you reach for?

I’ve learned an enormous amount from Amy, though I’m sure she finds me to be an intolerably slow study. In addition to helping me to gain a finer appreciation of whisky, two things that she’s taught me stand out. One is that she’s helped me to be more comfortable relying on other people. I had long conducted myself very much as a loner, dealing with whatever issue or challenge I faced internally. Being willing to reach out to others is healthy, it turns out, though it’s still not my first impulse. And second, basically since I was a high school student, work has been an all-consuming passion. Amy has helped me to step back from that and better appreciate non-work things, non-work time.

When I need a glass of something stronger than coffee, gin and tonic is my drink of choice.

Solid choice, Daveed.

Readers, you know what to do: buy the man's book.

George MacDonald Fraser, in his memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, already has one of my favorite quotes (.pdf) about platoon leadership in combat:

If you want to know how scared you've a right to be, look at the men around you. And if you happen to be a young subaltern, remember that they're looking at you.

Over the weekend, though, I finished his hilarious collection of stories The General Danced at Dawn. I do not think I have read a finer piece of prose on the anxieties and excitement of platoon leadership anywhere else. I cannot recommend it highly enough, so I'll just add that it was none other than Bob Killebrew, no stranger to small unit combat leadership himself, who recommended it to me in the first place. 

If you are like me, you mostly avoided the television and the op-ed pages today. I am not sure it is entirely healthy that we force ourselves, as a society, to grieve anew ten full years after a traumatic event like the September 11th attacks. Surely the best rebuke to an organization like al-Qaida would have been to have simply gone about our business as a nation, worshipping with our neighbors in the morning, watching football in the afternoon at the local bar, and in the evening preparing for a new workweek. Although my own path in life was in part set in motion by the attacks in 2001, I believe the best American response to the anniversary would have been to have simply enjoyed one another while hoping and planning toward tomorrow rather than mourning anew those lost in yesteryear.

But the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks does, I must say, give us a moment to pause and reflect on what lessons, if any, we have learned over the past decade. So while dining with Norwegian expert-on-all-things-jihadi Thomas Hegghammer in Oslo last week, I came up with the idea of asking him to participate in a special interview with the blog for the anniversary.

How much do I respect Thomas and his scholarship? I even changed the way I normally spell al-Qaeda al-Qaida for this post because honestly, who the heck am I to tell Thomas what's what?

A few years ago, you wrote a great essay in the Times Literary Supplement arguing that the trauma of the September 11th attacks retarded the development of dispassionate scholarship on jihadi movements. 10 years after the attacks, how are we doing? Has the field of study evolved in the United States? (While you’re at it, explain to us why it seems as if every tenth Norwegian has published peer-reviewed scholarship on al-Qaida.)

First of all, thank you for inviting me to contribute to your blog on this special day. Allow me also to take off my “dispassionate scholar hat” and extend my sympathy to the families of those killed on 9/11 and of the many who fell in the wars that ensued.

Ten years after 9/11, I am sorry to report that the academic study of jihadi movements is still underdeveloped. Things have improved a little bit since I wrote the TLS piece in 2008. There is a core of specialists who continue to do fantastic work, and we see some new recruitment to the field. But the community is still very small and populated mostly by people who are on the fringes of the academy, institutionally speaking (and that includes myself).

The fundamental problem is still the same, namely that the incentive structure in the universities, especially in America, is set against people specialising in the study of jihadi gorups. Studying al-Qaida usually involves qualitative methods and requires high-level skills in Arabic or some other oriental language. Graduate students with an interest in jihadism thus work against two strong biases: the quantitative methods hegemony in the social sciences and the skepticism in American Middle East Studies toward the study of hard security issues. These biases affect hiring decisions and have some striking aggregate effects: for example, there are virtually no tenured faculty specialising in terrorism (let alone jihadism) in any Ivy League school or in any Middle East Studies department in America. Rational graduate students with academic ambitions see this and wisely stay clear of the topic.

A related problem is that jihadism studies in the US lack an institutional home. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has partly filled this role, but even the CTC has rarely had more than one or two Arabic-speaking al-Qaida specialists based at West Point at any one time; several of the CTC’s best reports were written by off-site contractors. Another potential hub for al-Qaida studies was the Centre on Law and Security at New York University, but it recently scaled down its activities and looks set to close down. How America – with its huge academic workforce and enormous counterterrorism budget – in ten years has failed to produce a research institution with more than two permanent jihadism specialists is beyond me. As far as Norway is concerned, we actually only have around five scholars focusing on al-Qaida, but we have put them all in one place – the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) – and given them stable working conditions. By having 3-4 academics working on closely related subjects and interacting every day you get tremendous synergy.

Our friend Will McCants has been arguing that the Arab Spring is a disaster for al-Qaida. Do you agree?

The Arab spring is certainly bad for al-Qaida, but I would not call it a disaster, because the uprisings have so far only affected parts of the Muslim world. Important countries like Pakistan remain largely unaffected, as do the conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and elsewhere. In some places such as Yemen and Libya, jihadi groups arguably have more opportunities now than before the Arab spring. The short and mid-term security implications of the Arab spring are highly unpredictable. At the moment we see a decline of al-Qaida central, but it is difficult to disentangle the effect of the Arab spring from the effect of the concurrent tactical breakthroughs, such as the killing of top al-Qaida commanders and the capture of internal AQ documents. That said, I do think the overall net effect of the Arab spring is negative for the jihadi movement in the long term.

The United States has enjoyed some stunning successes against al-Qaida’s senior leadership in 2011. In Oslo, we discussed the possibility that al-Qaida Central might in fact collapse with a speed that could surprise us all. Sketch out a scenario by which that might happen. What does the rapid collapse of al-Qaida Central look like, and under what conditions might we expect it?

It is difficult for me to say, because academics like myself know precious little about the current inner workings of al-Qaida Central. The only people who have a chance of knowing what is going on are in the intelligence community, and whatever I say about the subject is sure to make someone in that community laugh. My overall impression, though, is that al-Qaida central has been severely weakened over the past six months.

Your award-winning book on al-Qaida and Islamism in Saudi Arabia has been justly praised. Tell us about your thesis, and also why al-Qaida’s insurgency was such a failure in Saudi Arabia in 2004 and 2005.

The book is basically a history of violent Islamism in Saudi Arabia after 1979. It tries to explain the ebbs and flows of militant activism in the Kingdom, focusing on the 2003-2006 terrorism campaign by al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula. I show that the campaign was not an organically developed domestic rebellion, but rather the work of an foreign-trained network of militants who had returned to Saudi Arabia after al-Qaida’s eviction from Afghanistan in late 2001. The rebels never enjoyed much popular support and failed to recruit outside a closed network of jihad veterans and their acquaintances. This made them an easy prey for the Western-supported security services.

A key argument in the book is that we have tended to overestimate the level of political opposition to the Saudi regime, because we have equated Islamism with anti-government activism. Observers have assumed that because Saudi Arabia has many Islamists, anti-regime sentiment must run very deep. But there are different types of Islamism and not all have regime change as their priority. The Kingdom has produced a lot of jihadists over the years, but most have been what I call extreme pan-Islamists rather than revolutionaries; that is, they preferred to fight non-Muslims rather than fellow Muslims. In fact, the normative barriers to revolutionary violence appear to be higher in Saudi Arabia than in the Arab republics. The non-revolution in Saudi Arabia earlier this year seems to bolster this hypothesis.

One of the more horrifying things I have seen recently was at your house: a DVD of jihadi propaganda and music sitting alongside a Norwegian children’s DVD. Tell us about your latest project examining jihadi culture. And please, also assure my readership (and your wife) that you do not sometimes get your DVDs confused and show your children jihadi propaganda.

Well, the two worlds are closer than you think. Some children’s entertainment is so bad it must be the work of al-Qaida. I have reason to suspect that Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri created the Teletubbies to destroy Western society from within.

The project you are referring to is about jihad culture, or “the things jihadis do when they don’t fight.” It is inspired by the observation that militants in the underground spend a lot of time doing things that appear to serve no immediate military purpose, like singing songs, reciting poetry, or discussing dreams. They also do unexpected things like weep on a regular basis, notably when reciting the Qur’an. The infamous Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, for example, was known among fellow militants as both “the butcher” (al-dhabbah) and “a weeper” (baki). All this “soft matter” of jihadism remains virtually unstudied; one reason, I think, is that it has been considered less consequential than the hard stuff of terror, such as attacks, resources, organizational structures and the like. My hypothesis is that jihad culture is not inconsequential at all; instead I think it may shed important new light on the processes by which jihadi groups recruit, exercise organizational control and make tactical decisions. I am sure that the military men and women reading this blog will find all this rather intuitive, because they have experienced the important role of music and rituals in their own organization.

As a first step in the inquiry, I am currently working with a great team of scholars on an edited volume that will explore various dimensions of jihad culture. I have recruited subject specialists – including a musicologist, an Arabic poetry expert, and an anthropologist of dreams – to help document and decipher al-Qaida’s internal culture. We are only scraping the surface of this vast topic but hopefully it will inspire others to dig deeper. Eventually I hope to write a monograph on some aspect of this topic, but that’s a few years down the line.

I usually end these Q&A’s with a list of the interviewee’s favorite drinking holes. And I imagine it must be depressing to be such a leader in your field of study yet still be only the second-brightest scholar in your own home. This, perhaps, explains your excellent taste in spirits. Tell us the best places to sip a gin-and-tonic from Princeton to Oslo to, er, Riyadh.

Princeton: The Triumph Brewing Company – a decent microbrewery and the least bad place in town for a drink.

Cambridge: The Conservatory in the Harvard Faculty Club – extremely preppy, but that is the whole point.

Oslo: For beer, I prefer Olympen, a 120-year old beer hall on the city’s east side. For G&Ts, I guess I would go for the deep leather couches of the Bristol Bar.

Riyadh: If I could sneak in a bottle of gin, I would drink it in either on the bridge of the Mamlaka Tower or in the golden ball of the Faysaliyya Center.

Takk! I knew there was a reason I went to school in Philadelphia (with its excellent bars and pubs) rather than New Jersey! (Or Riyadh -- not entirely sure which would be worse, honestly.) As for the rest of you, go buy the man's book here.